The Community Is Fine - people are not perfect, neither are you

[Aegis]

I didn't say that, I said the majority of people are fine.

Of course games like Dota and Lol have more volatile communities than games like eve, this point is that like for like communities are pretty much even.

ARR's community is the same a any other MMO I've ever played, and I strongly believe people who think differently do so for one of the reasons listed in the op.

I disagree, I think you are only using your own anecdotal experience that flies in the face of my own anecdotal experience.

There are differences between communities between different games. This is all simple demographics. Certain IPOs attract audiences from different backgrounds and at different ages, this leads to different communities.

Take, for example, when MMORPGs were first a thing (Early MUDs/EQs, up to the very early 2000s, maybe including XI). High speed internet was rarer than it is today, so those early adopters tended to be tabletop afficionados with the disposable income to meet (at the time) quite high PC spec requirements. These generally meant an older demographic with experience at socialising while RP'ing. These tended to be more friendly people (even when they were PK'ing you). Yoshi-P recently described his first experience at getting PK'd in DAOC and how that person took the time to tutor him.

Then enters a game like (for example) Star Wars Galaxies. It shares much the same community as the first generations of MMORPGs (essentially nerds) but with a significant portion of players drawn in by the recent Star Wars prequels who tended to be a lot younger. A lot of guilds introduced minimum ages when recruiting to cut down on smack-talking 13 year olds.

Other games were introduced that catered to different niches (FFXI for nipponophiles, EvE for Iain M. Banks afficionados) and the games' communities tended to reflect the niches they attracted (very polite JP; every party starting with ohayou, many congratulations when people dinged etc in XI. A generally, more sober, mature and ridiculously meta community for Eve).

As WoW brought online MMORPGs into the mainstream (as mainstream as pretending to be an Orc fighting Pandas is ever going to be) and high speed internet becomes almost ubiquitous, more and more people enter the community without any experience of the once-standard MMORPG etiquette, that etiquette starts slipping away. I remember the lols when I said 'ding' once I levelled in GW2 and the confused responses when I congratulated people when they hit a relatively insignificant level.

Then as Guild Wars ushers in the age of F2P MMOs and MMOs start catering to the (now huge) community's demand for games that are easier to pick up and put down (no/little death penalties, automated raid-finding), the genre becomes attractive to those that don't have disposable income for a sub and want more instant gratification. You know; kids and young adults.

This reaches its nadir (hopefully) with LoL. A game which requires no investment to get into, no repercussions for bad/rude behaviour and little to no chance of meeting players you don't like again. This game's community is known far and wide as being incredibly rude and childish.

If I were to sum up my own long, rambling monologue into a tl;dr it would be thus:

tl;dr The wider an audience you aim for as an MMO developer, the more negligable you make the non-raiding experience and the less responsible you make the audience for their actions, the worse a community that will result.

So... make a really niche game for really old people, make it punishing as hell and make it community driven and give it a sub. The result will be a great community (I think I just remade EvE).

Yeah dont include me with those sad POS. I may have a good or bad day im still not going to jump in game and bully, ninja, or be a general ass to people. I may not be a "perfect ray of sunlight" but im not a disease either. Being imperfect isnt a good reason.

THIS I have never told someone that I hope they die. I never saw it or heard from another that they saw it in XI, SWG, UO EvE or X|V version 1. I saw it very occasionally in GW, a bit more in GW2. I see it weekly now in DF and hear from others they see it often too. There has been a change. Believing it isn't so is, in my opinion, being disingenuous at best, willfully ignorant at worst.

[zakalw3]

My behaviour is fine. I can count on one hand the arguments I've had, and they've been petty squabbles about how best to handle a specific run, and none that have ended in name calling or vitriol.

And I've only met a dozen or so outright rude people in game.

[zakalw3]

Lich must be heaven in terms of ARR servers then. :\

Your own must be where all the jerks landed.

It's much more likely one of the reasons in the OP, though.

[zakalw3]

Aegis:

I've been a part of almost all the games you listed, and every time the forums declare "this game's community is worse than x", only for players to jump in game and be met with a majority of pleasant people.

I challenge anyone to record footage of x random games and start conversations to see just how much this is true. Or if you have a character on Lich, join me to test it.

Honestly, there has been no increase in the relative amount of bad eggs.

I guess RNG is RNG.

[Ebon_Drake]

I beg to differ, I'm pretty darn awesome!!

[Ralemont]

Imagine I can only party with *English players in this game. Ew! Disgusting!
*Again, most of them are rude, arrogant but not all of them*

Oh good, so you're only mostly wrong. I'm glad you have bad experiences. You don't deserve good ones.

[Argent_Wings]

There's no difference between CoD or Battlefield
There's no difference between Dota or League
There's no difference between ARR and any other MMO out there

That's great and all, but I don't think it's wrong to say there's a great difference between communities of different genres EVEN if there are people, like myself, who play all of them. Competition is no excuse for someone to turn into a jerk in LoL or Dota when they wouldn't be in ARR or CoD. No one is saying people don't have bad days or for whatever reason are just in one of those moods. The problem is that acting a certain way in said games becomes socially acceptable because no one even tries to do it differently. Either that or they're in the minority or simply don't feel like they should have to. A gaming community doesn't have to turn into Gotham City.

People develop this dog eat dog mentality where they feel the only way to survive in a world of jerks is to become one themselves. Being a flawed human being is never an excuse not to show decency to your fellow man. I don't even know why this is debatable.

[zakalw3]

Yes Agent, that's great, but I can guarantee you if we jumped in game together now the majority of players we interacted with would be pleasant.

Which is the point.

[Kayo]

Oh good, so you're only mostly wrong. I'm glad you have bad experiences. You don't deserve good ones.

Why? Because he said the truth? Id completely check off english servers in DF if I knew how to speak/type in Japanese. Unfortunately I cant type anything and only know some basic "tourist survival" Japanese.

You can get all "youre a filthy racist" if it makes you feel better but the fact remains Eastern cultures (particularly the Japanese) are raised to be more part of a community than the western who are raised to look out for #1 and only really care about each other when tragedy strikes.

[Ralemont]

Why? Because he said the truth? Id completely check off english servers in DF if I knew how to speak/type in Japanese. Unfortunately I cant type anything and only know some basic "tourist survival" Japanese.

You can get all "youre a filthy racist" if it makes you feel better but the fact remains Eastern cultures (particularly the Japanese) are raised to be more part of a community than the western who are raised to look out for #1 and only really care about each other when tragedy strikes.

I don't think he's a racist, not the least of which because "English speaker" isn't a race. I just think he's an uneducated moron. Not that the two are mutually exclusive by any means. But anyone who writes off interacting with English speakers as "disgusting" deserves what he gets from those people.

I wonder how much time you've actually spent in Eastern culture, or how much you've studied them. "Eastern cultures are more polite" is a gross generalization and doesn't actually reflect opinions towards different groups of people. People love anecdotal stories without actually bothering to do research. I had a woman in Japan come up to me and insult and belittle me for being American and was very surprised when I responded in perfect Japanese. OMG JAPANESE WOMEN ARE THE WORST.

Since you only know tourist Japanese, it's unlikely you'd even know when Japanese parties were making fun of you, since typically Japanese players make fun of foreigners to each other instead of, say, insulting you in auto-translate. Not that this is at all typical Japanese player behavior, just that when someone decides to be rude, it's less likely you'd know about it.

With all that being said, I have no problem with people saying that in general Japanese players tend to be more polite towards each other than American parties. It's self-aware of its anecdotal nature and I have no real hard data to prove one way or another. But it's at least trying to be analytical instead of downright insulting, and someone asterisking "most not all!" after a claim that a group of people is disgusting is a misguided attempt to seem nuanced and objective.

And just as long as we're being anecdotal, I've probably used DF over 60 times by now including Ifrit, and run into exactly one rude player. Perhaps I'm lucky, perhaps you're not. We won't figure it out just by people relating stories.